The numerous fixes to formations in A24 have made them somewhat usable, at least to walk around. Our formations are quite nice for micro and just neat walking around, so it's good.
However, a long-standing issue is that once active, you have them for everything, including orders like Gather or Construct, which don't make a ton of sense for formations (even if they will work once D2763 & D2702 are committed).
This diff, which should not be seen as "quite cleaned up" yet, lets the GUI provide default formation settings for some orders, which the player can overwrite, and can force "no formations" for other orders.
You can test the feel by having a few units walking around and ordering them to walk, then gather.
I think this feels good. It's very similar to Age Of 2-3's system.
IMO if we could merge this in A24 we'd have improved things greatly.
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In a finished diff, I would:
- implement some GUI indicator for the default formation.
- implement an option to turn this on/off & to choose the default formation.
- perhaps implement settings for a per-order setup, or at least allow confusing which orders are "with formation/without".
----Some possible TODOs:
Known issue:- there is no way to turn let units gather in formation for now. It would be nice to make both the default "on" formation and the default "off" configuration moddable (that being said, it's GUI, so it is moddable and MP-compatible).
- You can't order units to walk without formation. You'd either have to turn off the feature- perhaps implement settings for a per-order setup, oror at least allow confusing which order units individuallyrs are "with formation/without".
This seems fine to me, we could make double-clicking on the "null" formation disable the feature/set it as default.